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Not Just Plantations, but Factories

I used to think that the advent of factories marked the start of the Industrial Revolution. But there were factories operated by slaves in the West Indies a century before the Industrial Revolution began around 1750. Those factories were called plantations.

While the factory—“a building or set of buildings with facilities for manufacturing”—did typify the Industrial Revolution, such a construction had appeared a century earlier in Barbados in the West Indies. By the  1660s, English owners of sugar plantations had developed an “agro-industry,” fueled by slave labor.

The consumption of sugar skyrocketed in England in the seventeenth century, and the English in Barbados (and soon, Jamaica) took advantage of the demand. In his 1985 book Sweetness and Power, Sidney W. Mintz described a system he calls “the closest thing to industry that was typical of the seventeenth century”—Barbados sugar plantations.[1]

The plantations were not just agriculture; they involved a highly complex process that started with sugar cane planting and ended with at least partially refined sugar.  Slaves planted and harvested the cane, extracted its juices, and boiled those juices into products of various levels of refinement, from molasses to sugar. A typical plantation had one or two extraction mills, a boiling house, a curing house, a distillery, and a warehouse.

“The heat and noise were overpowering, there was considerable danger involved, and time was of the essence throughout, from the moment when the cane was perfect for cutting until the semicrystalline product was poured into molds to drain and be dried,” Mintz wrote.[2]

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Back to the 1960s

How to Study History

A few years ago, at a used bookstore in Leonardstown, Maryland, I picked up How to Study History. [1] Written by two well-known historians, Norman F. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider, it was published in 1967 and reflects views about history that prevailed when I was in college. They differ quite a lot from those I’m being taught now, as I will point out.

But first, you’ve got to love this book! It was written to give undergraduates a play-by-play description of how to study history. Somewhat patronizingly, it reminds the student “to carry with him [yes, him; it’s 1967] at all times a pen and some kind of note paper” and, ”as a general rule, avoid group study.”[2] But it also helps the student distinguish  between demonstrable proof and inferential proof and analyze both literary and artistic primary sources.

It sets high standards. The book includes two sample papers by freshmen. Overall comment on one: “A superior paper, yet you can do better. Try to be even more concise and to the point. B+.”[3] It’s been a long time, I believe, since superior papers received a mere B+

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Marriage, Families, and Economic Growth

From an 1840 Austrian book in the British Library online collection.

The United States is experiencing a period of low birth rates, primarily reflecting late marriages (aided by effective birth control techniques).[1] While low birth rates may harm the U.S. by holding back the number of productive workers, most historians of Europe have worried more about the Malthusian potential of overpopulation to outpace food production than about having too few people.

In fact, late marriages throughout much of European history prevented overpopulation.

Historians (and other social scientists) have compared family composition in northwestern Europe with families in other parts of the world, from southern Europe to China. Three academic papers, when combined, provide persuasive evidence that the family model of northwestern Europe not only prevented Malthusian excess but may have helped spark the Industrial Revolution.

Let me begin with John Hajnal’s 1982 article in Population and Development Review. Hajnal compared the age of marriage in preindustrial northwestern Europe (using figures from Denmark primarily, backed up by others), with those in India, China, and other parts of Europe. He found that late marriage—over age 26 for men, over age 23 for women—was the norm in northwestern Europe as early as the 1600s, while early marriage—before age 26 for men and before age 21 for women—was typical in the other areas studied.

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Crime and Punishment

Punishment should fit the crime. Last fall, taking a course on the Tudors and the Stuarts, I noticed that in early modern England (1485-1688) the punishments almost never fit the crime. A few examples follow, with comment below.

  • The great Catholic humanist Thomas More, author of Utopia, was Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor when Henry made himself the head of the Church of England in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon. Thomas More refused to accept Henry’s rejection of the Pope and Church doctrine, so he was beheaded for treason.
  • Archbishop Hugh Latimer, Bishop Nicholas Ridley, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer were not as lucky as Sir Thomas More. When Catholics returned to power under Mary I, they were burned at the stake, a horrific fate worse than beheading. In fact, nearly 300 Protestants were burned during Mary’s reign. (And Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day Protestant queen before Mary, was executed.)
  • Moving forward to Charles II’s reign, we find that at least 24 Catholics were executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered (another horrific way of dying) because they were accused of being part of a ”Popish plot.” Yet there was no Popish plot. It was invented by Titus Oates, a disreputable renegade who had been kicked out of many places, both Protestant and Catholic.

What troubles me most is that these (and other [1]) travesties of justice took place in a time when the English touted their liberties and judicial protections.

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History: All Story, All the Time

By Wallace Kaufman

Editor’s note: Guest author Wallace Kaufman, a science writer and mediator, earned a B.A. from Duke and an M.Litt from Oxford where he was a Marshall Scholar. He is the author of several books on the environment and housing, including a memoir and a sci-fi novel about the ethical issues of genomics. Recently he has taught poetry for Oregon Coast Community College and a course on environmental covenants at Texas A&M Law School in Fort Worth. He has served as resident adviser on housing and land reform in Kazakhstan, created several rural acreage communities with environmental covenants, and now works from his home base on a deep water slough on the Oregon coast.

 

I asked Wallace to respond to Arizona State University professor James O’Donnell’s “Law of History”: “There are no true stories.”*

All history is myth making. History is the transformation of legions of facts into a coherent story of the intended and unintended results of human behavior that embodies what seems to be important truth about human character and its potentials. The creators of these myths believe they have discovered Truth.

The historians developing any story line believe the story is true and embodies a universal truth because to them it makes sense, explains what happened, even how we got here and who we are.  This is, of course, my story about historians, whether the creators are propagandists, theologians, novelists, or meticulous scholars who call themselves historians.

Herodotus and Thucydides wrote history to teach moral values. Frederick Turner’s analysis of the western frontier shaping American history has all the elements of story—beginning, middle, end and lots of heroic characters. One of the most influential and destructive historians of all time was Karl Marx who constructed a dramatic history of constant class conflict. Slavery gave way to feudalism which gave way to capitalism which would inevitably lead to the final revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. A story with a happy ending—in the future, of course.

Why is history story? Just as we are bored by those books of the Bible that have endless begats: Salmon begat Boaz, Boaz begat Obed, Obed begat Jesse, Jesse begat David . . .  , we would all be bored by a pottage of raw historical facts. Many of us have taken courses that were little but names and dates to be memorized and meaning nothing or close to it. No story, no interest. But why must we be so entertained?

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